The Torture Lasts Forever
by Chihori Anigma
Summary: One night Alice Longbottom is walking in the alleys, crying about her husband who has disappeared. When her shawl blows away she is captured, too and put into a dungeon with her husband. After four months they are saved, but all she can remember is the torture she was put through. Warning:Excessive use of Cruciatus Curse


It was dark out. The stars and moon were covered by clouds that threatened to let down the rain they held inside them any second and a cold wind was blowing. A woman was walking, her head down, tears falling onto the ground beneath her. The bright blue shawl she was wearing threatened to fly away, being tugged from her shoulders by the wind. All at once the wind finally grabbed it and it was swept away down an alley and to the woman's future of insanity.

The woman dejectedly turned after the shawl into the alley, still keeping her head down. He husband had disappeared a few nights before and the Aurors still had no lead about where he had been taken. "Stupefy!"

A woman with pale skin stepped out of the corner she had been hiding in. Her clothes were all made of black material, matching her dark, curly hair and eyes. She stood above the woman for a moment, feeling the sweet taste of her victory. Then she sat on her broom, hitching up her skirt as she did so and pointed her wand at the woman. "Mobilicorpus," she said.

The woman's body rose into the air, her head and limbs drooping loosely towards the ground. As the woman in black began to fly the body followed her like an Inferius following it's master. At last the woman in black landed in front of a pair of huge doors inlaid with silver. She whispered the password and the doors slowly opened, letting her in and then closing after her.

She called up a house-elf. When it came, "Crucio!" The house-elf cowered and cried out in pain. Tear dropped out of it's big eyes, squeezed tightly together in an effort to stop the pain. At last the woman stopped the spell. She gave a kick at the house-elf. "Next time come faster when I call you. Now, take this woman down to the dungeons, where the man is."

The house-elf nodded and hurried to move the unconscious woman to the dungeons where her husband waited. When she was thrown into the room he cringed waiting for a wand to shoot red pain at him. After a while he opened his eyes. Being used to the dusk in the dungeon he immediately knew who was in front of him. "Alice!" he cried out his voice cracking from days of not drinking. The woman didn't move. He tried again. The woman still didn't move. He gave up and sank down in his chains, sobbing dry sobs, thinking his wife was dead.

Some time later footsteps were heard outside the room. The door opened and wand-light blinded the man in chains. The man with the wand stepped inside and gestured for someone else to come in. Another, slightly younger man walked in, trembling with excitement. "Wh...what should I do?" he whispered.

The older man sighed. "Incarcerous!" Thick ropes wrapped themselves around the still unconscious woman. "Crucio!" Wand still pointed at the woman. She woke up, screamed. Again and again. Her screams were high-pitched things filled with human pain. Her husband didn't dare move and could only stare in horror at the body bound in the ropes as it twitched, her instincts trying to make her run away. At least she stopped moving and screaming. Her body went back into the unconscious state it had begun with, begging mercy from the blackness.

Her torturer laughed and laughed. Her husband threw up onto the ground trying to stop hearing his wife's screams. Soon he did, hearing only his own screams as the younger man tortured him, a sick grin on his face. At last, he, too fell into the godsend of unconsciousness.

The next time the torturers came a different man was there instead of the younger man. Both the wife and husband were awake. The men took out their wands and spoke at the same time, the red lights leaving their wands and landing on their victims, perfectly synchronized.

The wife and husband screamed and screamed, the pain never-ending, and the torturers laughed to hear their screams. Every day, maybe more than once a day, the victims did not know, losing all sense of time in the dark dungeon, the torturers came down. They were different each time, sometimes it being the woman in black who had captured the wife, sometimes it being the younger man with the sickly grin on his face and sometimes it being the two brothers who had come down the second time.

The man fell first, having been there longer. His mind stopped functioning and he sat in the darkness not replying to his wife as she tried to talk to him waiting for the next pain to come. Soon the woman fell, too. She also sat in the dark not knowing what anything was except the feel of pain.

One day heavy footsteps came their way. The two sat in silence, not cringing, not noticing that there were more footsteps than usual, just waiting for the pain to come. A big burst of light entered the dungeon, coming from twelve wands held in the hands of people who had been looking for the two in the dungeon for four months.

The woman covered her eyes, but the man didn't move at all. "Frank, Alice?" A woman rushed forward to hug them both. They let her hug them, but didn't try to hug her back.

The Aurors untied the husband and wife and brought them to their headquarters. The two looked through blank eyes at the place they had known for most of their adult life. They were taken care of, given food and baths, but they had to be fed and just sat on the toilets, doing nothing. When talked to they didn't reply.

Eventually they were taken to St. Mungo's and put in Ward 49. They learned to eat by themselves and Alice gives chewing gum wrappers to the people she sees. At night they cry out in their sleep, dreaming of the pain they had felt. In the daytime they lie in their beds, staring straight ahead, seeing what, nobody knows.


End file.
